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Sunday, March 16, 2014

I finished up my rainbow scrap quilt on Friday night. I started sewing 6.5" scrap blocks in the summer of 2011 when I still lived in Kansas, and ended up with 120 of them at the Seattle MQG quilt retreat at the beginning of February. I made one more block at the retreat and sewed together the quilt top there. It's about 54" x 78".

This quilt has scraps going back a long way, here's a short list:
*fabric from my 4-H shirt (that went with lavender stirrup pants) when I was 12
*purple poly/cotton calico that I used to make a Barbie dress when I was 10
*a blue/red print that my mom made a dress for me out of when I was 5
*fabric from at least 3 baby dresses I made for my daughter
*fabric from my 9-year-old's baby blessing outfit
*fabrics from many of the baby quilts I've made for my kids and their cousins
and lots of other good stuff.

I used the famous Ikea numbers fabric for the back. I was really happy that it was wide enough for the back of this quilt! I love making pieced backs for quilts, but it was nice to not worry about that this time. There is enough happening on the front of this quilt, I think.

I decided to do a more open quilting design this time, and came up with this flower and loop free motion quilting design. I think it was more difficult than doing a simpler all over design like loops or stippling, because I had to look ahead and figure out where the next flower should go. And the quilting wasn't always easy to see with such a busy quilt top. I kept track of my time and it took 207 minutes to quilt, and 5 bobbin changes.

The binding is a sort of grungy gray dot fabric. And... there's a funny mistake in this picture, want to see up close?

While I was quilting, the edge of the backing fabric got flipped over and caught in the quilting stitches. I just trimmed the fabric close and left it for now. I was not in the mood to unpick anything when I got to the end of the quilting.

I'm so happy this quilt is finished!

And now I'm planning to try something else with my scraps for a while. I've already started cutting 2.5" squares from a lot of my scraps. I don't know what I'll make with them but I'll figure out something good. What are you doing with your scraps?

LOVE this - pieced fabrics from all your 'memories' put together to truly be a cherished heirloom. (Not that all your quilts aren't already but you know what I mean!) You should be so proud it's lovely.

This is delightful and so meaningful. Great job. I've had that backing caught up in the stitching issue before, too. Solved it the same way you did. Aggravating for sure, but we are nothing if not problem solvers!